Drone surveys in South Molton, flown by the surveyor who writes them

South Molton is around fifty minutes from Exeter, on rising ground between the Mole and the Bray on the southern approach to Exmoor. It is a market town surrounded by livestock farmland, and the work here splits fairly evenly between the town itself and the farms around it.

Exmoor to the north makes this a wet corner of Devon, with high rainfall and long wetting periods. The pattern is the same as Okehampton on the other side of the county: gradual, even deterioration rather than dramatic failure.

Exposed farm buildings out on open ground take sustained wind loading, and that is a different problem from the gusting a valley town gets. Sustained loading works on fixings, on sheet laps and on the connection between a roof and the frame under it, steadily, in the same direction, for days at a time.

Corrugated metal on agricultural buildings is the covering that shows it. What a survey looks for is corrosion around the fixings rather than across the sheet, sheets that have started to lift at the lap on the windward side, ridge capping working loose, and translucent panels that have gone brittle and cracked. On a long range those faults progress from one end, so knowing which end is worth photographing carefully.

One flight over a farm covers the house, the barns, the sheds and the yard together. For a working farm that is the point: it is a single visit that does not interrupt anything, and it produces a record of every roof on the holding on one date.

The Georgian centre around the square and the Guildhall is handsome and compact, with terraced cottages behind it and modern estates to the east. Natural slate and clay plain tile dominate the older stock, concrete tile the newer.

Farmhouses and barn conversions in the surrounding parishes are a category worth calling out separately. A converted barn has a roof that was designed for an agricultural building and has been asked to perform as a dwelling, often with insulation added underneath and rooflights cut into it. Those junctions are where the problems are, and they are all on the top surface where nobody looks.

This is livestock country and that is a real consideration rather than a courtesy. Flights are planned to avoid disturbing animals, which in practice means talking to whoever is farming the ground before the visit, keeping height and distance sensible over stock, and not flying over a field that is being worked.

Nothing about a survey is worth putting a herd through a fence for. Where the timing has to move to suit the farm, it moves.